Now that you’ve shot the individual parts of your scene, all that’s
left is to stitch them together into one giant image. For this task
you are of course free to use whatever software you’re comfortable
with (and you may very well not need my help here), but for anyone
who’s not familiar with panorama stitching I’m going to lay out the
procedure I use with Hugin, an open
source, cross platform panorama editor and stitcher.

As a disclaimer, I’m not by any means an expert on panorama stitching.
However, I seem to have found a technique that more or less works for
me, so I’m going to present it here in the hopes that it can help you.

We’ve covered the basic theory now, as well as the mechanics of
connecting a digital back (or mirrorless camera) to your large format
studio camera. Now it’s time for the fun part: setting up, composing
and shooting your scene.

Before I can get into the fun part, actually creating the photos, I
want to cover some of the gritty physical details of actually
connecting a medium format digital back to a large format studio
camera. In particular I’ll be illustrating the use of a Leaf Credo
digital back, because that’s the one I use. If you use a different
brand of digital back, or a mirrorless camera, you will need to adapt
these instructions to your own equipment.

This is the first part of my series on creating stitched large format
digital images. Part II is now
available.

Over the past few months, I’ve started working with a 4x5” view camera
and using what I believe is a somewhat novel technique for digital
imaging with it. There is, unfortunately, no commercially available
digital back at the moment that comes anywhere near the size of 4x5
film, let alone 8x10 and larger.
LargeSense may change that in the near
future, but the single-capture large format cameras they’re developing
are going to be very bulky and exorbitantly expensive (expected price
for the upcoming release of the 8x10 version is $106,000 USD).

You can, however, mount a digital medium format back (or a mirrorless
camera) to the rear standard of a view camera. Combined with rise,
fall and shift on the rear standard, you can sample different portions
of the image circle projected by a large format lens for static
scenes. Those samples can then be stitched together digitally,
producing a single very large image. Using this technique I’ve gotten
up to an effective sensor size of around 3x4 inches, which is why I’ve
taken to calling these photos “largeish format.”

Glass is one of the trickier materials to photograph, mostly because
it’s both transparent and highly reflective. Its transparency can be
perplexing–how are you to photograph something that you can see right
through?–and its highly reflective nature confounding as unwanted
reflections and glare mar your images. With a thorough understanding
of those properties, however, you can manipulate them to get just the
image you want. In this case, let’s take a look at the process I went
through to make this image of a glass of tea.